After spending my free time last week going through the better bart of 1300 images from our Hawaii trip, I noticed there were a number of panoramic sequences. The beauty of pano's is the ability to come closer to sharing with the viewer the majesty of the scene the photographer is blessed to take in.
In this case we have a series of images taken from the sea walk at the Hilton Wiakoloa Village on the big island in Hawaii. Yes I know it is Hawaii, HI but it sounds cooler saying "the big island".
Notice the start and ending images which are not included in the pano. This is a Scott Kelby trick that I have adopted in my photography. It brackets the pano images so they are easy to select. Speaking of which, the screen shot below shows the selected images and a simple right click or Control click brings up a number of option.
The "Edit In" is the menu item of choice as this is where you would normally make the jump to Photoshop (CMD-E or CTRL-E on windows does the same thing). This time you must move down the second list to Merge to Panorama in Photoshop. This takes these images into a Photoshop dialogue shown below.
I have the best results simply accepting the defaults on this screen by clicking OK. Now the magic begins. Normally when you take a Lightroom image to Photoshop, you get a copy of the image that is then saved back to Lightroom. We could have opened all these files in PS but then we would have had copies of all those images. Using the Merge to Panorama in Photoshop option simply uses the file and does not copy it. As you can see in the layers pallet below, all the files have been placed on their own layer with a layer mask.
This is really where the smoke and mirrors works its magic in Photoshop. The jagged edged black masks on the layers pallet shows the extent PS works at the pixel level. All to blend and position the images into one contiguous image. Once Photoshop has done its thing, I select the top layer and use the keyboard shortcut of Shift-Option-Command-E to merger visible while retaining the layers being merged.
This produces the following single image that we can now edit. One of the side effects of shooting a panorama is that the image ends up looking like a bow-tie after the merge that must be cropped resulting in a large amount of lost data. I was fortunate in this case. One of the techniques to mitigate this problem is to shoot in portrait.
Anyhow I went to Free Transform (Cmd-T) and used the Warp option to streach the corners slightly. This is a subjective adjustment but you must be careful to maintain a realistic look to the image. If it starts to go funky you will have to either crop clone .
Finally a crop must be made. If not to clean up the edges then to remove the excess data in the image beyond the canvas. With all the tweaks and adjustments done in Photoshop you can send the file back to Lightroom.
Simply click save and the image will show up in lightroom along with the original elements of the pano as shown below in the Lightroom Screen grab.
Stacking images will greatly increase the efficiency of you Lightroom workflow. If you like to keep the original images like I do, select all the images including the pano. Make sure the pano is the highlighted image of the selections. This will place the pano on top of the stack. Do not try to do this in a collection, it must be done from the Catalog Panel.
Finally with the stack selected I hit the number 9 key to make it a blue selection. This way I can scroll or filter to very quickly see where my pano's are.
Notice I did not make any adjustments to the original images in Lightroom before taking them to Photoshop for the pano merge. Corrections would be made locally while in Photoshop knowing the limitations of Lightroom. Once back in Lightroom further adjustments are applied to the pano.
The biggest advice for a good pano is not to use a tripod (it helps of course), but to shoot in manual with an averaged exposure (I start at F/11 and adjust shutter speed from there) and once focused, go to manual and fire away. Here is the final image, enjoy!
Hey that pretty much fills the blog today. Like I promised last week I will have plenty of Hawaii images up this week.
Take care... Doug
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